The New Bedford whaler Franklin was plying the ocean some 200 kilometers off Sendai in northeastern Japan that day of September in 1847, when the crew discerned twenty or thirty fishing boats weighing in the waves. A Japanese castaway who had been taken aboard in Honolulu asked the captain to lower the sails and stop the vessel for a moment in order to try and communicate with the fisherfolk. Startled at the sight of the three-masted bark at first, the seamen now approached readily. The ship’s boat was lowered, and “John” Nakahama Manjirō, the castaway, interpreted for a brief exchange of goods and information. Though it turned out that the castaway from Tosa province far south had difficulties communicating with the sailors from the northeast, his presence on board was a valuable asset for captain Ira Davis. Davis, who had repeatedly approached the shores of Hachijō, southern Hokkaidō, and minor Ryukyuan islands in the hope of establishing a contact, was conscious of the strategic meaning of traveling with a Japanese castaway, both as a pretext for landing in the secluded archipelago, and to facilitate a conversation with local authorities.Footnote ¹ On an earlier voyage aboard the ship Florida II in 1846, Manjirō and two fellow castaways had already been taken ashore near Matsumae when Captain Arthur Cox aborted their repatriation, since no formal handover to Japanese authorities could be organized.Footnote ² Whaling voyages to the abundant whale grounds off Japan had long blended in with missions to gain diplomatic and commercial access to the politically isolated archipelago.

The onslaught of Atlantic whalers on the Japan ground since the 1820s had turned the oceans around Japan into a maritime sphere of industrial production and international encounters. As an effect of industrial development in Europe and North America, the booming whaling industry had led ever more vessels to sail from their Atlantic harbors all the way to the prolific Kuroshio current in the Pacific. Georeferenced logbook data visualize that decades before the “opening” of Japan to diplomatic and commercial exchange with Western nations, whalers were cruising all around the archipelago (Figure 4.1c).Footnote ³ Contacts with whalers happened chiefly in the archipelago’s periphery: Particularly near the Ryukyus (Okinawa), and in the narrow Tsushima and Tsugaru straits, American whalers frequently cruised in plain view (see Figure 4.3). Regardless of stepped-up maritime seclusion laws, Matsumoto Azusa counts encounters with thirty-six vessels in Ezo between 1823 and 1853, events that included friendly communication, acts of piracy, trade in foodstuff, and the temporary landing of hundreds of sailors.Footnote ⁴ In the process, it happened time and again that Japanese sailors lost at sea were returned to Japan with eerie news of foreigners plying the ocean all around Japan. Curiosity about these developments spread among the broader population. Cheap and colorful world maps flooded the markets in the 1840s, depicting foreign vessels along with sea lanes and distance indications to overseas locations.Footnote ⁵ Years before the arrival of Commodore Perry’s famous black ships, it had become clear that Japan was surrounded by a rapidly transforming Pacific world.

Figure 4.1 (a–f) Georeferenced logbook data of American whaling vessels between 1820 and 1879. Note the explosion of whaling activity all around Japan in the 1840s, and the quick shift from the “Kuroshio Extension” to the Sea of Okhotsk after 1850. Mapped by the author, based on the American Offshore Whaling Logbook (AOWL) database. These data do not include British voyages, which also played a prominent role in the Japan ground throughout the 1820s. Author’s design.

These developments offshore forced Japanese policymakers to reorient themselves amidst a new geopolitical environment. Fear of naval incursions caused major discomfort among the authorities, who had long relied on a non-interaction policy with uninvited foreign approaches, in the interest of domestic stability. The shogunate reacted initially with stepped-up seclusion policies, such as the Shell-Repel edict of 1825, which commanded that any foreign vessel be shelled and repelled “without a second thought.”Footnote ⁶ The edict, which has been related to the sighting of forty-two vessels off northeastern Japan in 1823–1824 alone, effectively enforced a no-landing policy. The effectiveness of this policy is corroborated by the logbook data, which indicate that the coasts of the Japanese heartlands were actively avoided (see Figure 4.1c). In the archipelago’s periphery, however, whalers continued to cruise in immediate vicinity of the land.

The increased human presence at sea also improved the odds of rescue for those unfortunate sailors who drifted helplessly on the vast ocean. By the 1840s, it was not uncommon for whaling crews to include Japanese drifters and castaways picked up on the way, and, time and again, foreign captains approached Japan under the pretext of repatriating castaways, with the intent to establish diplomatic relations. Around 1850, there was a veritable colony of Japanese castaways in Honolulu. A certain Mr. Mung acted as an interpreter whenever there was a “fresh arrival of his shipwrecked countrymen,” as the missionary magazine The Friend reported. The life of this “Mr. Mung,” as Nakahama Manjirō was then called, was an odyssey across a rapidly contracting Pacific world.Footnote ⁷

One day in the winter of 1841, fifteen-year-old Manjirō was fishing about fifty kilometers off Shikoku’s southwestern cape Ashizuri, where boats clustered over a deep trough rich in large tuna. A sudden storm blew Manjirō and his mates to an uninhabited “bird island” in the south, where they held out for four months until the American whale ship John Howland discovered and rescued the five men.Footnote ⁸ His companions dispersed in Honolulu in the hope to catch a ride to Japan, but Manjirō joined captain William H. Whitfield to his home in New England. In the United States, the teenager learned English and attended a local school. By 1846 Manjirō was again touring the Pacific in the hope to be taken home. When he was finally left ashore on the southern tip of Okinawa in early 1851, the castaway was detained and brought to Nagasaki for thorough interrogations. The shogunate first confined him to his native Tosa domain, but within months, they had to acknowledge that his rare knowledge of the West had made him an indispensable aid to the architects of maritime policy.Footnote ⁹

Manjirō was recruited by the shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon who was observing the competition over whaling grounds with concern. In a petition the two submitted to the shogunate in the mid-1850s, Manjirō emphasized:

With the realization that foreign competitors were depriving Japan of its “national resources,” classical concerns of naval incursion became linked with claims over contested whaling grounds and maritime sovereignty.

In this chapter, we will see how the expansion of Atlantic whaling industries to Japan affected the archipelago culturally, politically, and economically. The topography of the ocean with its currents and winds, as well as the ecological transformations that occurred under the impact of pelagic whaling, are central to understanding the different levels at which oceanic encounters influenced Japan’s reorientation amidst a quickly transforming Pacific world. Decades before the opening of treaty ports, commercial development in the catchment area of the Kuroshio had enmeshed Japan in a process of maritime globalization at cultural, political, and ecological levels. The whalers, harbingers of empire, prompted the archipelago’s reorientation amidst the fluid geopolitical landscape of the Pacific, and they provided a blueprint for economically viable responses to new naval challenges.

Whaling as Global Environmental History

The history of pelagic whaling as it emerged in the Atlantic in the latter half of the eighteenth century is intimately tied to the emergence of capitalism and naval state power.Footnote ¹¹ Boxed up in national historiographies, modern whaling seems to emerge from local, subsistence-oriented “traditions” but a second look reveals that, in Europe as much as in Japan, whaling was one of the most capital-intensive early industries since the seventeenth century, bringing about essentially capitalist modes of investment and production. In fact, the expansion of quasi-industrial whaling to ever-new frontiers began centuries before mechanical industrialization. Whale oil grew high in demand as an effect of mechanical industrialization, chiefly as a lubricant for steam engines and as fuel for bright-burning lamps and candles. Whaling enterprises were extremely capital-intensive and relied on indentured labor, a circumstance that necessitated the development of financial and legal conventions to enable voyages that lasted for several years.Footnote ¹² The industry’s globalization was the result of a continued cycle of local resource exhaustion, technological efficiency improvement, and continued spatial expansion.Footnote ¹³

In Europe, the whaling industry emerged along transnational networks. Basque whalers were the first to expand their regional activities across the Atlantic as early as 1517. Basques had hunted whales locally since the twelfth century, but with their expansion to Newfoundland, they began peddling their produce – whale oil, baleen, and bones – all across Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ Though operating over vast distances, the Basques remained coastal whalers tied to try-pots and hearths on shore. Accordingly, they felt the impact of local whale stock decline within a few decades. As the Basque outposts shifted to cod fishing in the 1580s, their whalers were instead hired by Dutch enterprises that sailed to Svalbard (Spitzbergen) starting in 1612, a newly-discovered archipelago in the Polar Sea.Footnote ¹⁵ In Svalbard and its neighboring Jan Mayen Island, each shareholding chamber of the Dutch Noordsche or Groenlandsche Compagnie kept seasonal settlements with flensing and trying facilities on shore. With the decline of local whale populations and, increasingly, frozen bays during the short ice age, the Dutch developed methods to hunt and flense whales offshore. This enabled their expansion to the still-abundant whaling west of Greenland. Despite an average annual ship loss rate around 4 percent, the business remained lucrative and the Dutch whaling fleet grew to 258 vessels by 1721, carrying an estimated 11,000 sailors.Footnote ¹⁶ Before long, the effect of this whaling boom became noted elsewhere.

In New England, drift whales were once “so numerous that no need had arisen to go to sea to kill them,”Footnote ¹⁷ but significant decline in whale and fish abundance was apparent by the early eighteenth century, and in 1720, it was reported that the coastal whale fishery on Cape Cod “has failed … as it has done for many winters past.”Footnote ¹⁸ New England whalers subsequently expanded their activities further south along the coast, to Long Island and North Carolina.Footnote ¹⁹ Around 1762, whale blubber was tried out first aboard a New England vessel, an innovation that dramatically expanded the scope of voyages.Footnote ²⁰ Thereafter, whaling activities expanded first to the Caribbean and the Cape Verdes, then to South America and, in 1789, the British whaleship Emilia was the first to embark on a whaling voyage to the Pacific.Footnote ²¹

British vessels had reached the Japan Ground shortly before the American fleet, making for a prominent presence off northeastern Japan in the 1820s.Footnote ²² Georeferenced ship positions from the AOWL data give a clear picture of the spatial development of the whaling frontier.Footnote ²³ Once the whaling frontier had reached Chile, it expanded from the Humboldt Current to the South Equatorial Current off Peru, and from there, it spread all across the Pacific. Figure 4.1 (a–f) shows that the whalers, who had first reached the Kuroshio Extension around 1820, gravitated toward the Bonin Islands over the 1830s. It is during this decade that a group of retired whalers established the first permanent settlement in the islands, bartering food and freshwater to the frequently approaching vessels. During the 1840s, Americans were hunting whales all around the Japanese islands, including the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk.

The whale rush to the Japan Ground coincided with the heyday of the American whaling industry. Whaling voyages had been halted entirely during the war of 1812, but by the 1820s, the Pacific figured prominently among the whaling destinations. As Figure 4.2 shows, the number of ongoing voyages partly or entirely carried out in the Pacific peaked in 1847, before a caesura during the Mexican–American war ushered in an era of decline. Statistically, this development was accelerated by the fact that some vessels whaling in the Pacific moved their enrolment to the kingdom of Hawai‘i after mid-century, thus falling off the American records.Footnote ²⁴ In any case, by 1860, the industry was shrinking worldwide. Specifically, the georeferenced logbook data show that the crowd of international vessels that had populated the seas of Japan in the 1840s were shifting to the northernmost edges of the Sea of Okhotsk since the 1850s, indicating that declining whale stocks had reduced the profitability of Japanese whaling grounds (Figure 4.1c–4.1d).Footnote ²⁵ Competing over a dwindling number of cetaceans, Yankee whaling had been in decline for over a decade, and pressure on the industry increased with the commercial extraction of petroleum – a substitute for whale oil – after 1857.Footnote ²⁶ By the time the Japanese joined the scramble for the Pacific in the 1860s, the frontier of international whalers had long moved to the northern rims of the Sea of Okhotsk, leaving the Kuroshio region with a sharply decimated whale population.

Figure 4.2 Count of ongoing American offshore whaling voyages per year 1750–1927, and the share of voyages partly or entirely occurring in the Pacific. By the late 1850s, the industry was in sharp decline. Note that single vessels can carry out multiple voyages in the same year, explaining a peak voyage count of 976 in 1847 while the number of American vessels peaked at 722 in the same year. Based on the American Offshore Whaling Voyages database.

Despite its ephemeral nature, the whaling industry played a central role in the expansion of imperial power to the Pacific. The United States’ state-led effort to combine experience-based knowledge produced by private whalers into a scientific geography of the Pacific, first with the United States Exploring Expedition and later Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Whale Charts of the World, was intimately linked with the expansion of American commercial and naval power to the Pacific.Footnote ²⁷ Whalers were drafted for war in 1812 and in the Civil War, and since the 1840s, their civilian presence in the Pacific provided the pretext for violent actions against mutineers and hostile islanders.Footnote ²⁸ Eventually, the desire to repatriate castaway whalers from Japan was the ostensible motivation for M. C. Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853, even if the commodore’s primary interest in Japanese coaling infrastructure and export markets was evident.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, the “opening” of Japan unfolded in a landscape of overcrowded and declining whaling grounds, but by the time the first treaty ports opened in 1860, the whaling industry had long fallen prey to itself (see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Spermo Cutting in Whales on Japan, 1822, oil on canvas (ca. 1823), by J. Fisher, in: NHA, Call No.: 2008.31.2. Note the visibility of the coast line.

Between Proto-industry and Defense Policy

A decline in whale populations has been noted in Japan since at least the 1820s, a tendency that accelerated over subsequent decades. Whalers along the Kuroshio and Tsushima currents were the first to go in debts with investors and domain lords. This led to the invention of new financial mechanisms that accommodated fluctuating catch volumes from year to year, but by the 1860s, domains had to step in granting emergency credits or disbursing rice rations to bail out entire whaling communities.Footnote ³⁰ Falling catch rates also inspired research into improved whaling methods that Norwegian and American whalers would only explore decades later, such as the use of firearms against whales.Footnote ³¹ Given the lack of necessary know-how and the fact that the whale produce in demand on Japanese markets needed to be processed on shore, the Japanese were by that time unable to expand their pelagic whaling frontier at a pace that would have momentarily sustained their catch while local whale populations declined.

In Japan, whaling grew into a substantial proto-industry from the seventeenth century onwards. Japanese historian Morita Katsuaki writes of a “whaling revolution” that unfolded over the 1590s in the aftermath of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s unification of the realm.Footnote ³² The wakō pirates who had raided the coasts of East and Southeast Asia since the fourteenth century out of bases in Japan and the Ryukyus were now compelled to become permanent residents tied to their bases on the coasts of Kii, Tosa, Hizen, or Nagato provinces in western Japan.Footnote ³³ The experienced sailors developed methods to chase whales by orchestrating hundreds of men in tens of agile rowing boats by means of flags and smoke signs from tall promontories (see Figure 4.5).Footnote ³⁴ The whale hunt had been practiced locally before at a much smaller scale, but over the seventeenth century, the number of enterprises grew fast.

Ōtsuki Heisen, a universal scholar and expert on whaling described the industry’s history in his 1808 Historia of Whales as a gradual expansion from Mikawa Bay in central Japan to the Kii Peninsula around 1590, whence branches were set up in Shikoku: “By the 1620s, the whale groups began to hire people here and there, on islands and in bays, settled for a location, and began to hunt. In the 1650s and 60s, they became more and more profitable and as many as 73 whaling groups had been formed.”Footnote ³⁵

Over the first century after this “whaling revolution,” the methods and organization of whaling were in constant transformation, and circulated with traveling experts. At the industry’s peak, Japanese whaling likely employed more men than the Dutch industry at its best: If the seventy-three whale groups Ōtsuki Heisen counts around 1670 employed an estimated average of 300 seasonal whalers, the workforce would amount to well double the manpower sailing for the Dutch half a century later.Footnote ³⁶

As an effect, some coastal whaling grounds declined within a few decades. At Heisen’s time, some die-hard whalers in Owari province kept “roaming the sea tirelessly, regardless whether there were any whales or not. Whenever it looks like a catch could be made, they rush to Ise to hire men. The same holds for Shima province.”Footnote ³⁷ Whalers from Mikawa Bay, again, migrated to the Kii peninsula, where the fast and nutrient-rich Kuroshio current meanders along the continental shelf (see Figure 4.4).Footnote ³⁸ The current acts like an enormous pipeline or “nutrient stream” that transports high concentrations in nitrates and phosphates. The nutrients are consumed by plankton and attract fishes of all sorts wherever the current climbs over underwater ridges or on the continental shelf into the photic zone, within the reach of solar rays.Footnote ³⁹ Around the Kii peninsula, the current’s steady supplies from the greater Pacific supported the resilience of whale stocks and delayed the impact of commercial resource extraction.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 4.4 Map of early modern whaling regions in Japan.

Time and again, experienced whalers from western Japan applied for permission to establish new branches in hitherto untapped regions, such as the Izu Islands. Just a year after the botanist Tamura Genchō had published a description of whales in his Illustrated Explanation of Produce of the Izu Islands of 1791, an inquiry from Kii province reached the shogunal intendant in Izu, asking for permission to explore whaling in the magistrate’s jurisdiction.Footnote ⁴¹ The intendant, Egawa Tarōzaemon Hidetake, had taken on his office just days before he started an investigation whether whaling was already practiced among his subjects, finding that in all of eastern Japan, only two villages in the Bōsō peninsula customarily hunted a “fish” called tsuchibō, the Baird’s Beaked Whale.Footnote ⁴²

The intendant’s interest was that of an economic planner, as his correspondence with the shogunal finance department two months later shows. With the help of outside experts, he believed, the industry would flourish in his district:

Whether the whaling entrepreneurs were state institutions or private investors, whales were, at this point, commodified resources that could be pursued according to a clear-cut business plan. Investors, and notably state officials, conducted research and made mathematical estimates about the profitability of new whaling frontiers, relying on seasonal and migrant wage labor. Unlike the whalers sailing out of Atlantic harbors, however, the Japanese remained tied to their bases on shore, a fact that limited their scope of activity to ten or fifteen kilometers from the shore.

A flourishing whaling industry also promised naval preparedness at little extra cost. Defense services under the Tokugawa were largely devolved into the hands of domains, who performed patrol and infrastructure duties at the order of the shogunate, in a manner comparable to corvée labor.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the turn of the nineteenth century, Russian presence in the Sea of Okhotsk had expanded, prompting Japanese authorities to relocate whaling groups to the northern frontier. When the shogunate confiscated Matsumae domain in Ezo and seized direct control over the frontier in 1799, they also relocated the whaling group of Daigo Shimpei, an organization with around six hundred men on fifty-seven boats, from the Bōsō peninsula to the Kurile island of Iturup. Shimpei died in 1802 of “climatic disease,” and his settlement of Shana, home to three hundred Japanese whalers, was devastated in a Russian raid in early 1807. Despite the deployment of troops from Hirosaki and Morioka domains and the dispatch of several shogunal vessels, the skirmish ended in a shattering defeat for the Japanese.Footnote ⁴⁵

This did not overshadow Ōtsuki Heisen’s praise of the civilian and military benefits of whaling. In his Historia of Whales of 1808, the scholar and later headmaster of the Sendai domain academy wrote:Footnote ⁴⁶

Moreover, watchtowers used to spot whales near the coast were also used for coastal surveillance in various locations. Heisen had been dispatched to the whaling regions of western Japan upon a request by his relative, the renowned physician Ōtsuki Gentaku who, since an encounter with whalers en route for Iturup in 1800, had contemplated the industry’s viability in his home domain.Footnote ⁴⁸

Heisen’s work supported his first-hand observations in Hirado domain with the geographical treatises by Johann Hübner of 1693 to explain how whales were caught in Spitzbergen, Greenland, the Americas, the South China Sea, and elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁹ This global perspective connected the local whaling enterprises of Japan to an international context: “[I]n the oceans, there seem to be paths along which whales migrate…. Since the whales of Tsushima, like those of Iki and Ikitsuki, migrate to the sea of Manchuria, they must be of the same [stock] as those in Korea.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Though he may not have thought of this as a resource competition, Heisen understood the ocean to be a border-crossing system that humans harvested over vast distances. With Heisen’s encouragement, further state-led attempts to relocate whalers were undertaken in northeastern Honshu over the early nineteenth century, but visions of investors and economic planners were met with resistance in the locality, over fears of effects on the herring fisheries as well as spiritual considerations (Figure 4.5).Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 4.5 Early modern processing of a whale carcass in Tosa province. Tosa hogeizu, in: KPL, acc. no: mp000050-200010.

Offshore Trafficking

By the 1820s, the prolific whaling and tuna fishing ground off northeastern Japan was plied densely by both local fishermen and ship crews from distant countries. Tuna fishers from Mutsu province habitually sailed to deep-water fishing grounds dozens of kilometers offshore, where they increasingly encountered large foreign vessels. In 1824, the discovery of “informal diplomacy,” as David Howell frames these casual encounters, called for thorough investigation. When a crew of twelve Englishmen came ashore in the town of Ōtsu in search of fresh food, Aizawa Seishisai, a notorious nativist and xenophobic scholar, was called to the site to interview the whalers and submit recommendations for a political response.Footnote ⁵² Aizawa’s investigations revealed that fishermen sailing beyond view from the land habitually engaged in friendly exchange with the whalers offshore.

As one commoner stated, the fishermen did not understand why the shogunate would treat these foreigners like enemies: “Since the foreigners are extraordinarily friendly, we wait out wind and rain on their ships, and in the blasting heat they offer us water and provide medicine when we are sick. They have been tremendously helpful. All they do is hunting whales, which exceeds our strength, so they hinder our fisheries in no way.”Footnote ⁵³

This sort of clandestine offshore mingling was an unacceptable challenge to state authority, as the Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on foreign relations.Footnote ⁵⁴ Interaction with Christians had been strictly forbidden since the expulsion of Jesuits in the early seventeenth century, and under the repeated invocation of an “ancient law” that forbade trading with new partners, such informal exchange risked undermining Japan’s official policy.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a consequence, the shogunate issued the so-called Shell-Repel edict in 1825, which ordered that defense batteries fire at any foreign vessel approaching Japanese shores, and even if officials were to fire at Dutch or Ryukyuan vessels by mistake – which were authorized to trade with Japan – they should not face punishment. Ideally, however, violence should be restrained and ships allowed to escape.Footnote ⁵⁶

As numerous recorded encounters with foreign vessels in the archipelago’s periphery show, the common practice over the ensuing years was centered on conflict avoidance rather than blind confrontation, especially so in Ezo and the Ryukyus.Footnote ⁵⁷ A law (fure 触) issued around the same time specified that: “When sailing, it shall be avoided consciously and as best possible to encounter foreign vessels. If it becomes evident post factum that friendly interaction occurred secretly, [perpetrators] shall be punished severely. Since informants shall be rewarded even if they are former accomplices, they need not keep any secrets.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The striking discrepancy between the shogunal authorities’ anxiety and the fishermen’s carefree curiosity reflects a divergence between abstracted geopolitical concerns and the experience of personal encounters on the (whaling) ground. News of castaways rescued by foreign vessels spread a positive view of foreigners beyond the coastal communities, while rumors of foreign designs on uninhabited islands in the vicinity of Japan raised concerns among the learned elite.

The Bonin Islands Question

Over the next decade, the whalers increasingly deflected south to the still-uninhabited Bonin Islands, where they could restock on fresh water, firewood, and turtle meat. As we have seen in Chapter 3, the islands had attracted the interest of foreign governments through Japanese texts since the late eighteenth century, but only when whalers began to stop by the Bonins regularly did American, British, and Russian explorers claim formal discovery in 1824, 1827, and 1828, respectively. In 1830, British consul in Hawai’i Richard Charlton authorized a group of former whalers accompanied by twenty-five Hawai‘ian men and women to settle in the Bonin Islands. Apparently, the expedition was underpinned by the settlers’ private funds.Footnote ⁵⁹ The colony that catered fresh water and foodstuff to the frequently approaching whalers grew as result of new business opportunities rather than grand imperial designs.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although the British government decided by 1834 that the Bonin Islands were too remote to serve as an offshore entrepôt for smuggling into China and Japan, the Superintendent of Trade in Canton, Charles Elliot, raised the need to police the region lest the whalers in their “acts of depredation” would incur the wrath of the Japanese.Footnote ⁶¹ As tensions were mounting between Britain and the Qing empire on the eve of the Opium War, Elliot again urged his government in 1837 to militarize the islands.Footnote ⁶² These developments were reported readily by the Dutch in their fūsetsugaki missives to Nagasaki, whence the rumors circulated among the learned elite.Footnote ⁶³

It was the trio of Watanabe Kazan, Takano Chōei, and Koseki San’ei, three intellectuals in the entourage of shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon, that voiced the most explicit concerns about these developments, and about the shogunate’s conservative response. Chōei and San’ei had studied medicine under Siebold in Nagasaki, and Kazan, a renowned painter and poet, had dedicated himself to the study of Western art and politics. The three had come together in their study group Shōshi kai to debate political and technical responses to the disastrous Tempō Famine (1833–1836), such as the propagation of buckwheat and sweet potatoes to increase resilience against crop failures, but soon their discussions revolved around questions of international affairs.Footnote ⁶⁴ With the participation of shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon Hidetatsu Tan’an around 1835, their suggestions gained access into the realm of political practice.

Tan’an had assumed the name Egawa Tarōzaemon, which was both a name and an office, when he became the Intendant in Nirayama.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Egawa family had belonged to the trusted inner circle of shogunal security policy for many generations. The most senior official in the Izu peninsula, Egawa administered a large part of Izu province, including its islands and the town of Shimoda at the peninsula’s southern tip. He was also responsible for a mountainous stretch of the Tōkaidō highway to and from Edo with its checkpoint at Hakone, and for policing maritime traffic into the city. Vessels bound for Edo from both western and northeastern Japan were required to undergo a preliminary inspection at Shimoda before entering Sagami Bay. During Tan’an’s tenure, the intendant’s responsibilities for navigational security along this most important cargo route between Edo and western Japan was expanded to the coasts of Awa and Kazusa provinces, to encompass Sagami Bay in its entirety.Footnote ⁶⁶ One scholar in his entourage claimed that since the Izu peninsula “extends far into the sea, one can sail in all directions; as you go east, you may reach as far as Edo in half a day; as you sail to the west, you may reach Osaka and other places within one day!”Footnote ⁶⁷ Having enjoyed a formidable education – including lessons in cartography under the grand geographer Inō Tadataka (see Chapter 3) – Egawa attracted an entourage of scholars and artists with whom he discussed strategies for domestic and international politics.Footnote ⁶⁸

The members of the Shōshi kai grew particularly alerted to the news that Britain had brought the “islands of the South Sea (Nan’yō) from the Bonin islands south”Footnote ⁶⁹ under its control. Chōei warned that “since the islands in the vicinity of Japan that belong to England are so numerous, her ships continually travel to and fro. It is hard to underestimate the danger that in the future they will become hostile and obstruct our maritime transportation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Kazan and Chōei advocated for friendly relations with Britain to reduce Japan’s vulnerability to information manipulation by the Dutch, and to Russian designs on the northern frontier.

Their concerns about Japan’s inadequate preparedness and response to foreign incursions seemed to materialize with the arrival of the brig Morrison at the entrance of Edo Bay on July 30, 1837. The brig was chartered by the German missionary Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff to repatriate seven Japanese castaways and coincidentally spread the gospel. With the help of the castaways, Gützlaff had just published the first Japanese translation of St. John’s gospel in Singapore earlier that year. Among the castaways were four who had drifted to the Philippines, and three others who had been picked up by the Makah tribe in the Oregon Territory, having drifted across the Pacific for fourteen months. Since no deployment of a British man of arms was authorized, the castaways were put aboard the Morrison, a civilian vessel sailing under the American flag.Footnote ⁷¹ Although Japanese authorities had been informed by the Dutch about the approach and, presumably, by informants in Naha, where Gützlaff and three of the castaways changed ships, its arrival provoked the only known instance in which the Shell-Repel edict of 1824 was put to practice: One cannon ball from the harbor artilleries hit the ship’s deck and chased the mission away before a handover of castaways or sacred scripts was possible.Footnote ⁷²

In Japan, however, the Morrison incident triggered heated debates about the country’s preparedness and ushered in reforms in the maritime defense structure of Edo and Sagami bays. Even conservative voices like Hayashi Jussai, the headmaster of the Confucian Hayashi Academy and father of City Magistrate Torii Yōzō, recognized that firing at foreign vessels with Japanese castaways aboard would risk undermining the principles of benevolent rule. Jussai admonished that “it is important for a rightful ruler to show mercy even for those lowly sailors from distant provinces, for they are our countrymen!”Footnote ⁷³ The scholars gathered at the Shōshi kai were outraged when they learned that the shogunate had explicitly ordered that the Morrison be driven off in the same manner as the Russian Rezanov expedition back in 1804, which, as a retaliation, then proceeded to attack the Japanese whaling station in Iturup. Chōei had mistaken the name of the Morrison as the name of the expedition leader, whom he held to be the eminent physician and missionary Dr. Robert Morrison, who had been active in China, but had already passed three years prior. To encounter a friendly approach of a learned person with such disrespect, Chōei feared, would arouse the wrath of the foreigners.Footnote ⁷⁴

Shortly after the Morrison incident, rumors began to circulate that the shogunate had ordered the magistrate Hagura Geki to inspect the Bonin Islands on an extended routine visit to the seven islands of Izu. Together with Kazan, Chōei, and San’ei, Hagura had joined the study circle Shōshi kai.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hagura had suggested to extend his routine visit to the Izu Islands and “examine soil and produce” in the Bonins.Footnote ⁷⁶ Most likely, the planned expedition was inspired by Kazan, who readily applied for a leave from his home Tawara domain in the end of the previous year to join the expedition.Footnote ⁷⁷ Documents kept at the Egawa Mansion in Nirayama indicate that the expedition had been planned in earnest and was only aborted days before its intended departure in the third month of 1838, and that by no lesser than Chief Senior Councilor Mizuno Tadakuni himself. The head executive of the shogunal government found no need for a man of Hagura’s rank to embark on such a mission. Instead, he commanded that: Hagura Geki’s expedition to the island Ogasawara be suspended and [instead], islanders be added to the crew. These we shall dispatch to seek a maritime route and investigate thoroughly whether any useful produce can be found, and if it should be found that [the islands] will gradually become useful, you shall submit another request.Footnote ⁷⁸

The note indicates that Mizuno was not in principle averse to an expedition beyond Japan’s inhabited territory, but given the risk of confrontations, the expedition should be kept at a low profile.

Subsequently, Kazan stepped up the tone in his Writings on the Conditions in Foreign Countries, a security analysis he submitted to shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon in early 1839, for which he had studied the defense layouts of all major harbors in the West. He cautioned that “whenever Anglia with her navy seized distant territories to colonize fecund lands in the warm zone, she relied on islands that granted access to strategic routes and naval advantages, which she occupied and named before any other nation to forestall annexation by others.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The poet laid out his concerns more elaborately in a manuscript titled A Case for Restraint, in which he cautioned that:

Kazan’s criticism was directed explicitly at the Don’t Think Twice edict and the unfriendly treatment of the Morrison’s approach. He continued arguing that Japan’s location amidst a densely traveled sea would make the refusal to open harbors an obstacle to foreign interests and potentially provide a reason for war, for “though they are lowly barbarians, the westerners never raise an army without stating a reason: when [Napoleon] Bonaparte invaded Egypt, he gave two reasons, one being [Egypt’s] obstructing navigation in the Mediterranean, the other was an old enmity. The same reason could indeed provide the grounds for Russia’s and Britain’s arrogance.”Footnote ⁸¹ If earlier writings expressed admiration and curiosity about the West, Kazan’s prose now expressed frustration and anxiety. Perhaps hesitant about his own tone, he ruled against circulating the text and, for the moment, put it away in a drawer.

Around the same time, Chief Senior Councilor Mizuno was made aware of an anonymously circulating text titled Tale of a Dream that warned that foreign “gunboats had brought the southern sea under complete control,”Footnote ⁸² and criticized the shogunate’s perilous policy of firing at peaceful foreign visitors. The text circulated in different popularized versions and was widely read. Some accounts have it that the text was laid before the shogun, who was impressed with the author’s extensive knowledge, and that very fact raised suspicion.Footnote ⁸³ Mizuno commissioned City Magistrate Yōzō to investigate the matter. The latter immediately suspected Chōei, Kazan, and the private study group Bussan kai or “Produce Society,” which Kazan had attended since 1837. Kazan also advised the private study circle in drafting plans for a private expedition supposed to sail to the Bonin Islands in the summer of 1839, a project he continued to support informally after his own, official expedition with Hagura Geki had been halted. Under the initiative of a priest from Mutsu province, eight intellectuals and entrepreneurs in the group had formally applied – though unsuccessfully – for a permission to explore the islands’ “strange minerals and unknown plants,” since this would be “extraordinarily gainful.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The group continued to meet monthly at the home of botanist Abe Rekisai (1805–1870), the head of a renowned lineage of physicians. As the botanist asserted in a later interrogation, the scholars had grown interested in the islands through the ostensibly harmless project of growing pepper domestically, but others in the group seemed primarily excited about the prospect of meeting with foreign settlers in the Bonin Islands.Footnote ⁸⁵

Yōzō coopted Hanai Toraichi, a member of Kazan’s Bussan kai, and forced him to spy on the group and report as an undercover agent.Footnote ⁸⁶ Toraichi reported to the authorities that the group was most keen to make contact with foreign settlers in the Bonin Islands. At one meeting, Yamaguchiya Hikobei Kanejirō, a merchant who had procured a map for the expedition, got ahead of himself asking Kazan:

Toraichi further reported illegal attempts to borrow firearms and gunpowder, a fact that led to the arrest of several members of the project, and exposed Kazan’s apparent plans to “go adrift willfully and arrive in Luzon, Sandwich, or America.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Tanaka Hiroyuki finds that only in the course of these investigations, which exposed Chōei as the author of the Tale of a Dream, Kazan’s projects also aroused suspicion. Kazan was taken into custody in the fifth month of 1839, and Egawa, under pressure, submitted Kazan’s Writings on the Conditions Abroad as evidence.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the course of the investigations, the even more outspoken Case for Restraint, which Kazan had put away in a drawer, was also discovered.Footnote ⁹⁰ The poet was immediately charged for:

The subsequent incarceration of prominent exponents from Egawa’s intellectual entourage became known as the Purge of Barbarian Scholars or bansha no goku, a term centered on the government’s ostensible rejection of foreign scholarship. In the aftermath of the Meiji reform, Chōei, San’ei, and Kazan were portrayed as visionaries while Yōzō was vilified as an incompetent and blind xenophobic, the necessary antagonist to the celebrated forebearers of Japan’s modern revolution. In reality, however, the events were not so much a conflict between “Confucian” seclusionism and progressive reformism, but rather, an affirmation of state authority at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

Chōei was thrown into jail and Kazan was sentenced to house arrest.Footnote ⁹² San’ei, having heard of the purge, immediately committed suicide. Impoverished and abandoned under arrest in his home domain, Kazan ended his life in the fall of 1841.Footnote ⁹³ Hagura was demoted to a financial clerk in Osaka but began to write about naval strategy again in 1849 under the government of Abe Masahiro.Footnote ⁹⁴ The botanist Abe Rekisai, again, was left off the hook after serving a stint under house arrest. He continued to publish and fantasize about those novel plants he would one day grow in the Bonin Islands. As we will see in Chapter 6, Rekisai alone would eventually travel to the Bonin Islands, when the shogunate decided to colonize the whaling base in 1862–1863. Added to the expedition as the botanist-in-chief, Rekisai reached Chichijima in the summer of 1862. A few days from his arrival, he noted in his diary: “Offered a sacrifice to the shrine and buried the souls of my old friends beneath a stela.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The Colonized Pacific

Shortly after Kazan’s arrest, it happened that the cargo boat Nakayoshi-maru from Mutsu province got caught in a storm and drifted for over a month before the six sailors made landfall on a southern island. On shore, they discovered a village of around thirty “black people with red eyes”Footnote ⁹⁶ living in straw huts and feeding on yams and turtle meat. The sailors could barely make themselves understood, but the islanders provided food and helped repair their boat before they sailed north again about two months later. As the sailors later reported, “since [they] have quite enough tools and clothes, but we never saw any artisans that would produce them, they must belong to some country. They must have a motherland [to which] they go back and forth.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Hearing such reports, the harbor magistrates who interviewed the castaways upon return to Japan reported to Edo that “thinking about the route of this drift, perhaps this is one of the Bonin islands.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The whaling boom of the 1820s and 1830s had turned the Pacific into a place of industrial production and constant human presence. This chapter has shown that there was a specific geography to this industry’s activities, one that was seasonal and changing over time. Currents and whale migration shaped its development and the encounters it drew after itself. Japanese fishermen routinely sailed to deep-sea fishing grounds tens or even hundreds of kilometers offshore, where casual exchange with foreign sailors remained undetected. Yet the leaking news of such “informal diplomacy” caused anxieties among Japanese authorities who reacted by issuing the edict “not to think twice but shell and repel.”Footnote ⁹⁹ By the 1840s, American whalers were sailing all around the Japanese archipelago, especially in the prolific Kuroshio and Tsushima currents, but also in the Japan Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, while the Bonin Islands were made a permanent colony of settlers and ship jumpers. It was noted throughout Japan that whale populations declined, so that by mid-century, the shogunal intendant Egawa Tarōzaemon warned of a competition over “national resources” (kokueki) and the geopolitical risk this development bore for Japan. Given the naval importance assigned to whaling businesses in Japan, the advent of foreign whalers was readily linked to naval security concerns.

Wary of instigating a naval conflict that would threaten to end in a similar debacle as the Opium War in China, the shogunate eventually revoked the Shell-Repel edict in 1842 and put in place an Order for the Provision of Fuel and Water to distressed vessels to effectuate their peaceful departure.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Subsequently, some ship captains began seeking out remote places, preferably small islands in the Ryukyus, where requests for water and fresh food were dealt with pragmatically. In the spring of 1847, when the castaway “John” Nakahama Manjirō was traveling aboard the American whale ship Franklin, the vessel approached an island that may be Iheya or Aguni, north of Okinawa, where several officials, seating poised on straw mats, awaited the sailors on shore. Since Manjirō could not decode their Ryukyuan language, little conversation was possible, but the officials readily procured two live cows which they handed to the captain in exchange for two rolls of fine cotton cloth.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Japan’s outlying islands by that point had become an integral part of the Pacific food web that supported international economic activities at sea. The handover of castaways, however, was reserved for more politically consequential moments.